Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned. I think.
I have recently had cause to reconsider which of my actions in the last few months have been sinful and which righteous, and I implore your patience as I explain and your guidance as to what I must atone for in this tangled web.
I was, I am still, by the grace of God and my family a student at the great university of Paris. My attendance began only last autumn, and I have been, until the beginning of the events I must recount, under the protection and guidance of my elder cousin, Louis.
It was by his design and connections that we came one night to a meeting near the Franciscan quarters at St. Germain for a secret demonstration. I should perhaps have refused such a doubtful adventure, but I was hopeful that I might discover a master to guide my own study to great heights. My only ambition since my arrival at the school having been to find a light such as Anselm or Abelard by which to illuminate my own poor faculties with a little borrowed light.
The day was growing dark as we walked, and lights were few and far between. Parisians hoarded their light behind wooden shutters in the cold of the evening, and we had brought no lantern.
Just by the city wall, we were met by a pair of older students bearing torches, both cloaked and hooded in black. Without words, they proffered black cloths and made clear we were to be blindfolded for whatever followed.
Seeing Louis submit without demur, I followed him. I was not overly concerned about this show of secrecy, once I was certain this was not some scheme to relieve us of our purses and leave our bodies to the river. I have always had a fine memory, and for years then I had counted steps as a meditation, tracing the course of the great labyrinth at Chartres, which I had the privilege to see as a youth. I expected I would remember the way to whatever secret place they led us.
The blindfolds were tugged off after a roundabout journey to reveal a doorway that could easily have been no more than a hollow in the earthen bank and dark stair down inside it. We were hurried down the stair before we could spy any landmarks. Within was a low chamber, barely tall enough to stand in, built of ancient pitted stone, but with curving walls in the manner of a natural cave. It must have been very ancient, perhaps some temple of the Romans or even the antique Gauls. The chamber was lit with an unnatural light, bright white sparks fixed to the ceiling, too bright for me to look at long enough to see their nature, revealing perhaps a score of students. At the far end of the room, a naked body lay on a stone slab that could only be some pagan altar.
We must have been here to witness a dissection, since it seemed unlikely my cousin would conduct me to a haunt of heretics or witches with other uses for a cadaver, but why should such a thing take place in secret and at night, not in usual rooms of the medical faculty?
And why should I witness it? I was no student of medicine yet, and did not intend to be. I was to be a doctor of the church and learn theology and canon law, perhaps enough to serve the Holy Father or some great archbishop.
Before I could ask Louis, the little conversation there had fallen silent. A tall man with a huge sweep of belly and ox-broad shoulders entered, stooping through a door behind the altar. He wore a long tunic of green bright as mown grass, like no cloth I had ever seen, and over it a surcoat of black velvet, embroidered with borders of silver thread describing a strange alphabet. Even a new student such as I could not fail to recognize Gheret van Brugge, most flamboyant of the university’s doctors of medicine, as I am sure you could not fail yourself, Father.
He kindled two more of the white lights in his hands and pressed them to the ceiling above the altar, where they stuck, then addressed the gathering.
“Attend, all of you. This is the body of Luitpold, your brother and my student. Two weeks past, he attempted the refinement of the Elixir of Life without supervision, or success, and inhaled a fatal mass of the vapors of boiling mercury. I could not allow him to be discovered in the aftermath of his experiment, for all our sakes.”
It has been only a few years since the Bishop last condemned heretical teachings in the university, and obvious pursuit of alchemy would certainly have drawn violent censure and perhaps the attention of the ever-eager Paris mob. Even if the eyes and ears of the church remained closed to certain doctors and subjects, no matter the outrages discussed and perpetrated behind closed doors, or in the depths of the earth.
Van Brugge continued with no sign of worry.
“I preserved the body against this demonstration, and because the learned could determine the manner of his death, as I will demonstrate.”
Louis drew me closer to the altar, pushing through the tightening press of students until we were almost in the first row of spectators, so I had a very clear view of what came next, enough to be sure that it was not a failure of my eyes when I saw the impossible.
Van Brugge drew his finger down the body’s naked chest from the hollow of the throat to just above the pubis, and the skin parted as if the nail of his finger were a razor. He drew it down again without effort and the breastbone split without any sight of a bonesaw. He did the same for the scalp and the skull under it.
“See,” Louis whispered. “He is a true magus. He needs no knife.”
There was reverence in his voice, but I could not share it. My soul, I thought, recoiled from this unnatural spectacle.
“Let us begin with the cause of death and the affected organs,” said van Brugge.
It seemed that he expected his audience to have seen a dissection before, since he began at once to discourse on how each organ he removed and presented to us differed from an ordinary one.
“As this mercury was drawn in as vapor, we can observe the greatest sign of it in the lungs.”
He raised the organs up, and indeed I could mark a tracery of darkness winding through the pinkish mass of them, picking out minute chambers and veins.
Next he removed the brain, and again I could see where it was stained and darkened as if by soot in parts.
“As a thing drawn in by vapor soon reaches the blood, and the blood is drawn to the brain near as much as to the heart, here we see the quicksilver’s mark again. Take note of this, students, if you mean to pursue alchemy in any wise. Smaller inhalations of mercury may still leave such a mark, and they can give rise to disordered thought and to a wasting illness if they do not kill at once.”
Now reaching lower, the doctor removed the dead man’s kidneys, and from an incision in one he dripped a little measure of quicksilver, bright as silver fire in the strange light.
“Encountering the coldness of the body, the vapors of mercury cool once more and become liquid. This is the evidence any anatomist would find, not only an adept, since many poisons may be found deposited in the kidney. However, it is the least dispositive to a clear understanding of the true cause of death, since mercury taken as a tincture may also be found so, while the other marks I have showed you come only from the inhalation of vapors.”
I had a host of questions, of objections and outrages, but I found I could not speak them in that place. The atmosphere oppressed with rapt solemnity, and van Brugge’s slow and careful voice following his huge, deft, never-resting hands enraptured me as he displayed structures of the body, known to these students of anatomy perhaps, but new to me. My marvel at the intricacy and perfection of God’s design silenced the disgust that should have come with so much base matter, blood and flesh and bile. Van Brugge showed the vessels of the blood that spread out from the heart, the cords and slabs of muscle and the tendons that tighten them to bone-like wires, and the nerves that bear the impulses of thought and will from the brain into the limbs, and all of it was wonder to me.
Louis and I were blindfolded again when the demonstration finished, and led away from the rising murmur of conversation that followed. Our guides took us back to the place they had first met us by a different route, but I had no difficulty remembering our steps, and they were kind enough to press a torch into Louis’ hand as they departed.
I turned on him as soon as they were out of earshot.
“Why did you bring me to a conspiracy in an old pagan temple, Cousin? A secret dissection to conceal heretical alchemy? Charlatan’s tricks to make it look as if the doctor’s finger could part flesh and bone like that?”
I grew so heated as I spoke that I saw I had seized Louis’ tunic with both hands. He pried them loose gently.
“The dissection was no great matter. Study medicine and you’ll see more of them. And don’t speak to me of heresy. You know the mob is just as happy to beat students no matter the excuse. Do you really wish they’d gotten one out of poor Luitpold’s death?”
I had no answer for him. Most of the students were surely blameless, and he was not wrong that the commons of the city would relish any excuse to roust students and masters from their rooms and beat them, but I could not dismiss the possibility of heresy and sin so easily, and I was furious to be offered a great teacher at last and him cloaked in such vile garments.
“What of the lights then, of van Brugge’s finger? Louis, what have you gotten me into?”
“Did you not listen before? Where Luitpold failed, van Brugge has long ago succeeded. He has drunk the Elixir of Life, and he is a magus, an alchemist of the body and the soul. He can teach you things no other master of the colleges can, and tonight was your first chance to prove that you are steady and close-mouthed enough to learn from him. It was my second, and I think I will soon be initiated into some lesser mysteries.”
From the rapture in Louis’ voice, I knew I had already lost the coming argument, but I could not forebear to begin it.
“What was the first?”
“I witnessed a transmutation. He drew the subtle spirit from a stone as quicksilver and turned a pewter spoon to pure gold before all of our eyes.”
“That is sorcery. It may be the province of saints to change matter from one form to another, but not of scholarship. I won’t go to such a meeting with you again, and you should not go either. You should confess and attend better to your soul.”
“Don’t be a bumpkin, Bernard. Aren’t you studying to be a canon lawyer? There’s no prohibition against miracles, only false ones, and van Brugge is as good a Christian as any man you’ll meet. Alchemy is not witchcraft or demonology. It is the refinement of his soul that gives him power over matter and form.”
He put a fervent hand on my shoulder as he spoke, and I had no answer. The charge of bumpkinism stung. I was only a boy, and less than six months in the city, not yet a theologian, but I could not shake off the deep unease that the alchemist’s demonstration and his casual deception of the authorities who should have been concerned with the death of his student. Would the young man even receive a Christian burial?
You may see, I hope, Father, that despite my hunger for a great teacher, I was not careless with my soul.
Two days later, I went alone, Louis having refused my invitation, to see one of the theology faculty’s most eminent doctors, Achille la Rocelle the Dominican, preach a public sermon on the steps of Notre Dame. La Rocelle was a Savoyard, and one of the bishop’s chief champions against heresy within the faculty of theology. It was rumored he might be the next dean. More than that, he was said to be a powerful speaker.
The crowd was respectable, with many from the town as well as the university and the nearby cloisters. I saw more women out of habit there than I had in the last month of cloistered study. I wondered how many of them had come for simple curiosity or pleasure, and how many, like me, were concerned about the present state of their soul. Perhaps that was why Louis had refused to come; he would not wish to admit any such worry, no matter his inward thoughts.
Framed by the great towers and the bright glass of the windows, la Rocelle stood alone on the steps, robes white as a dove. He spoke with force and conviction on the cursing of the barren fig tree as told in Mark and Matthew, and enjoined each of us who listened to cultivate ourselves, that it was our duty as Christians to prepare ourselves by prayer and study, to purify ourselves of sin and doubt, and to bring forth the good fruit of faith and charity and Christian love, and that failure to so bear would end in death and the condemnation of the soul to hell.
The sermon called to my mind at once Louis’ talk about the refinement of the soul, but I was certain that he had struck upon a bad road. Here was the true way to God: prayer and faith, charity and love, not secret arts and bubbling potions and hiding in old pagan halls, and here too in la Rocelle was the teacher I had wished.
The trouble between Louis and myself over van Brugge and his esoteric teachings became worse a few days later. Louis entered our shared lodging after vespers, a little flushed with wine or with the cold, eyes bright with some excitement.
“There is another of van Brugge’s secret demonstrations tonight, and a place for us there. Just before matins, we are to observe a conjunction of Mars and Jupiter with the Dragon’s Tail.”
I shook my head.
“I won’t go to another of those meetings, and you should not either. Even if you’re confident that there is no sin or heresy, the look of things… If you’re found with them, it might be very bad for you. You could be thrown out of the university.”
He stepped back and stood tall with a look of real hurt on his face.
“That’s nonsense.” I could hear the strain it took him to keep his voice light and unconcerned. “This is my invitation to join van Brugge’s real students, and to learn how to refine my soul. It’s a chance for you too. Don’t waste it, and don’t think of asking me to waste mine again.”
“I will not risk my soul for any wisdom, no matter what it is.”
He looked me up and down for a long moment, lips twisting as if he chewed hard words, but in the end he simply huffed and went back out again.
He did not return by the next morning, and I was left to worry for him and to pursue my own studies and fretting alone. I attended a Mass said by Doctor la Rocelle in the Sorbonne chapel for a small audience of students, many of them dressed, like la Rocelle, in the habit of the Dominican order, or in simple white clothes very like it.
All of those dressed in white, and a few others like myself, remained after the Mass to hear the doctor speak. He discoursed again on the duty of all Christians to prepare ourselves that we might bring forth good fruit for Christ. He counseled us to cultivate ourselves by study, by giving charity, by the observation of all prescribed fasts, and by meditating on true doctrine from the fathers of the church.
He invited those who had stayed to join him and his brothers in distributing alms among the poorer quarters of the city, so that soon I was carrying a basket of loaves from the college ovens to two orphanages maintained by the Dominican Order, and helping the nuns who worked in them to set out tables for the feeding of beggars. It was good work, simple and honest, and I felt cheered by it as we walked back to the university.
I was more cheered when one of the white-robed Dominicans, a dark-skinned man with the accent of Navarre in his Latin, drew near me as we walked.
He introduced himself as Sancio de Monzόn, and told me:
“It’s obvious from your attention to Doctor la Rocelle’s speeches and to this charity that you have a sincere faith and desire a righteous life. The doctor leads a group of some evenings at the Sorbonne college in reading and prayer, and you would be welcome to attend tomorrow after vespers.”
Of course I took him up on the offer. There were about a dozen of us. La Rocelle gave a short reading from the Epistle to the Romans, and we students sat at four small tables, each with a poor copy of a longer passage from St. Ambrose that seemed to contradict the evangelist. In small groups we discussed and debated the subtle meanings of the church fathers, and la Rocelle went from group to group and guided our discussions with careful and incisive words. I walked home in the dark of the late evening with the light of learning to brighten my steps. I had found a teacher who would uplift my meager wisdom, and one who would not place me in any danger of sin as van Brugge had already done to Louis.
Of course I returned as often as I could. While there were many of us present that evening, and at later meetings, Sancio was most often my partner as we discussed the readings that la Rocelle set for us and his exegesis of the old texts. I learned more about Sancio as we talked; his fervent faith was the inheritance of a family always at the forefront of the Reconquista, and his own hope was to be a missionary when he finished his studies here, to spite the Saracens with argument where his fathers had used steel. I had no doubt he would bring many souls to Christ if he received the post he desired. His faith burned hot in each word he spoke, and he was as adept as anyone I had ever heard at framing the complex arguments of the church fathers into plain speech that cut straight to the heart.
I learned much in the next weeks, almost as if I had already received my diploma in the liberal arts and begun the study of theology years early. I felt welcome at once among la Rocelle’s disciples, and they made no remarks about my youth or inexperience, but sometimes all but me would halt and look thoughtful at something that seemed an idle phrase in their discourse or la Rocelle’s lectures, and then I felt there was some secret between them in which I had no part.
I saw Louis only rarely. We still slept in the same lodging, but he returned after I had snuffed the light most evenings. He was absent from ordinary lectures more often than not, and when we spoke, he would only hint at great secrets and undreamt powers revealed to him by van Brugge’s alchemy. Once, I tried to invite him to join the reading and discussions under la Rocelle instead, and he poured scorn on me, and made wild slanders.
“At least I know the dangers and the unnatural character of my teacher, Cousin,” he said.
“What can you mean,” I demanded, “comparing a doctor of the church to your alchemist?”
“You would not believe me,” he said, and turned to go.
I caught his arm and made him face me.
“No, tell me what you meant by that, or I will know you have already fallen very far following that sorcerer.”
He bent close, almost as if he meant to kiss my cheek.
“No, Bernard, I cannot tell all or you will think me mad or witless, but I promise by blood and by my oath that still I want only your happiness and safety. I cannot tell you what you will not hear, but please, promise me that you will not go with la Rocelle anywhere you may be alone and unobserved, or with his closest disciples to such a place. It might be very dangerous.”
I could only gasp at his audacity and the madness of his words, but at the same time, his calm and sincere voice robbed me of anger. He left the chamber and I could not help but worry for his safety and his soul. I ought to have worried more for my own.
It was in the Sorbonne chapel that things came to a head, more than two months after Louis and I began to fall out. The less I saw my cousin, the more I prayed for him. I felt that somehow our positions had been reversed, and he was rightly in my care, a duty I failed each time he spent an evening in secret lessons with the sorcerer van Brugge. I prayed alone with Sancio for a time that day, each of us kneeling and addressing our thoughts to God as we might, but after a time Sancio turned to me.
“I can see you are more than usually gloomy, Bernard. What troubles you today? If you tell me, perhaps I can offer you some help or advice.”
I can’t deny that I felt a spark of relief at the offer, but I resolved to do right by my cousin before considering my own comfort.
“This bears on more than just myself, dear friend. Before I tell you, you must swear to keep everything I tell you close as confession.”
“Of course, by the cross and the blood of Christ I swear it.”
Now I could unburden myself in truth. I let the tale spill forth, from the first in that tavern and in the hidden temple after, all I had seen and all I feared that I had not. The hints Louis had given me and my imaginings of what sins and heresies he might have been led into, everything from pagan sacrifice to Pelagianism.
Sancio listened with the patience of a saint, and when I trailed off into my bad dreams and mumbles, he said:
“It sounds as if your cousin wants just what he should; to improve himself and grow closer to God by it, but you are not wrong to fear for him. I have heard rumors around the man van Brugge, many of them deep and dark. Perhaps with the right arms or the right arguments you can set Louis back on the right path.”
He smiled a little smile and leaned closer, as if we were conspirators. I felt a quickening of excited hope in myself.
“You know by now that there is more than one select group of students at the university, and you have joined in many of our meetings already, but there is more to our circle under Doctor la Rocelle than simple scholarship. We have a discipline of prayer and speech that may be what you need. Meet me here tomorrow, at matins.”
That night, I had my own hints of secrets and initiations to dangle at Louis, and though he pretended unconcern, I heard a catch in his voice when I told him I would soon learn mysteries from a more pious and Christian master than his. He repeated his warning about being alone with la Rocelle, and might have been ready to say more, but I silenced him with laughter rather than hear him slander the great teacher who would soon raise me up.
Sancio met me outside the chapel, and led, with my eyes uncovered, to a postern in main hall of the college, which led up a narrow stair, half hidden behind plaster walls, and up onto the building’s roof.
In a cramped shed built over the stair’s top, Sancio pressed a bundle of white cloth into my hands and bid me change my attire before I followed him onto the roof. I doffed my belt and tunic and my heavy hose at his word and put on the garment, a robe white like Dominican habit, but simple and coarse as Franciscan garb, with a cord to tie it. There were other bundles of clothes in the shed, and hooks for them, and so I left all but my underclothes there and went onto the roof clad like a mendicant.
The wind was cold, the moonlight pale and silver, and I was caught in a feeling of reverence and childish acceptance like the first Mass I ever saw in the cathedral of St. Lazare. On the roof, constructed so as to be invisible from the streets below, there was a little open-sided chapel, with its altar and rail and tabernacle all of white wood, and it was lit with a thousand candles, and the air was full of the sweet scent of flowers out of season. Sancio and ten of the other students I had seen at the more public gatherings were there, and la Rocelle himself stood in the sanctuary.
As Sancio ushered me forward to kneel just at the rail, the flickering light played tricks at the corners of my eyes, so that the others seemed to loom and shudder and twist into unnatural shapes like their own shadows. I brushed it aside, and knelt where I was pointed, right at the front and center of the gathered students.
La Rocelle addressed us.
“We who gather here are called the Orcharders, for we are met to cultivate the good fruit in ourselves, but we are not gardeners only. The gardener knows that good fruit grows only from good seed, and the seed of man is corrupt. Eve’s sin taints us from the womb even unto the grave and the Resurrection.
“Therefore, we graft the good that grows already in the Garden onto our sinful branch, as the orcharder grafts sweet to sour and brings forth apples fit to eat.”
I followed the sermon easily enough to that point, and I expected to hear the metaphor completed by relating the word of God, as spoken by the gospels and the saints, to the good tree which we must graft to ourselves to overcome sin.
Instead, la Rocelle turned to the tabernacle, and from it he drew something bright and red in his right hand, and the shadows of the candlelight twisted and tore around it so that I could not see it clear. He held it over a silver chalice and it burst to fluid in his hand and filled the cup up to the brim.
He came to me at the rail and held the cup forward, against all propriety. It was full to overflowing with red, thicker than wine, thicker than blood.
“Take the good fruit of the unfallen world into yourself, young one, and bring it forth new,” said la Rocelle, and his teeth shone in the candlelight.
He pressed the cup toward my lips, and I was frozen. Half of my mind was still limp with awful reverence the hidden chapel had inspired in me. The other half strained against my limpness in its horror and tried to make me run, but could not rouse my chilled limbs to any action. I did not understand this horror or what la Rocelle offered me, but I was certain it was blasphemy at least, and likely sorcery and diabolism worse than I had ever believed existed.
I tried to clench my jaw shut, and watched myself like a doomed figure on some tragic stage as my lips opened for the draught.
Just as la Rocelle tipped the cup, there was a sudden crash from behind us, and every eye, my own as well, turned to see Louis bursting from the broken ruin of the shed’s door. He had a blazing torch in one hand, and somehow a knight’s falchion in the other.
He caught my eyes for a hanging moment.
“Bernard, run!” he shouted.
That was the blow to snap my bonds. I stood, but strong hands seized me, Sancio on one side and another man with him. They forced me back to my knees with more-than-ordinary strength and I would swear on the cross that I felt something moving, like a snake in restless dreams, under the skin of their hands where it pressed against my flimsy robe.
Louis charged forward, and the Orcharders rose to meet him. The first to come close stumbled back from the torch thrust in his face. The second spread his arms wide, and I thought his shape flickered like shadow. He reached for Louis with wide, grasping arms. He, and everyone, seemed shocked when Louis cut him open at the belly, and he fell screaming. I would have gone white with the shock if I had not been bloodless with fear already. To see Louis, a gentle student of medicine, cut open a living man with as little pause the masters cut into a corpse, it was almost as much horror as that awful fruit and bloody cup.
All the rest of the Orcharders recoiled, and Louis leapt over the fallen man and right at my captors. I heard myself shout something that might have been “no” as he swept the blade at Sancio, but I need not have feared. I should not have feared either. Sancio could not be the friend I had known these last months. He was something else now, but I still shouted.
Sancio opened his mouth, and it kept opening, lips peeling down over his chin down to the hollow of his throat and the great maw revealed was black and full of white teeth that writhed and quested in the air like maggots scenting rot. Sancio, the devil that I had called Sancio, caught Louis’ falchion in that black maw and held it there. My other captor loosed me and went straight for Louis, hands out to throttle him while Sancio held the sword in his mouth.
Louis threw down his torch, and it burst with a flash of blinding white and crack like a thunderbolt. I was blind, and my ears rang, but I still felt Louis’ hand on my shoulder, pulling me up and pushing me to run.
I ran. I remembered where the fallen man was and did not trip over him. I counted the steps back to the shed and the stair without stumbling. I thought I could hear Louis just a step behind me as the ringing faded, but when my sight began to return, and I stood at the top of the stair and looked back, Louis stood still in the chapel, hard against the rail. The Orcharders hemmed him in toward la Rocelle, who still held the awful cup steady. La Rocelle had arms spare to hold with—no, not arms, flaps of amorphous muscle like the foot of a clam, tearing through his robes at the side. In one blink they were blacker than the sky, in the next pale as dead skin, shot through with purple veins, yet again they looked bloody, like flayed muscle bunching and straining in the air.
Louis raised his falchion in both hands, but la Rocelle’s new limbs plucked it away with contemptuous ease, and then they lifted Louis. He kicked his legs like a fussing child. La Rocelle pushed the chalice to him.
He turned a moment in his struggles, and when he saw me, frozen on the stair, he shouted.
“Run, Bernard! Run now!”
Somewhere in the broken boards of the shed, my dagger lay with my hose and tunic, but I was not bold enough to find it and fight. I pounded down the stairs, and wondered where I ought to go.
Perhaps I had gone mad. I was no saint, to see such visions of devils. But perhaps when the Devil comes into the ordinary world, anyone can see him and his works. Perhaps la Rocelle was an alchemist like van Brugge, and the smoke of those candles had been full of some drug that deranged my reason and made me imagine marvels.
I reached the bottom of the stair and ran on into the street, white robe flying around my shins. I glanced back, and there were some of the Orcharders flying, drifting down behind me on wings of shadow or flesh. More must have been coming down the stair. I had to run, and run I did, but I needed a destination. I did not have much faith that devils would tire before my legs gave out.
I needed to escape them, somewhere they could not find or would not go. I thought first of the Templars and their fortress across the river, but even if I could reach it and gain entry, they would be more likely to have me chained as a heretic than help me, unless my pursuers were helpful enough to provide evidence.
Then at once I thought of a place the Orcharders might not find me, and where my story was most likely to be believed: the ancient temple where van Brugge hid his work.
I ran through the black streets, squinting at the ground in front of me to keep from tripping in hollows or over refuse or slipping in muddy ruts. When I could I looked back, and once I saw the Orcharders behind me, and once not, and three more times I wasn’t certain.
I trusted my trained memory to lead me to the hidden temple, and hoped they would not be close enough on my heels to see where I went in. By the time I reached it, each step stabbed knives of pain up through my shins, and a stitch I could not help thinking must be as painful as Christ’s blood spear-wound tore at my side.
Even knowing I had arrived, I barely saw the opening, a little piece of hummocked turf no one had bothered to level enough to build in, with a few exposed stones whose shadow hid the entrance to the stair. I ducked inside and stumbled down. I might have fallen at the bottom if I had not been caught by a dark-robed student who pressed his hand over my mouth, and conducted me forward, to the rear of the small crowd of spectators, and let me lean against the wall.
He need not have bothered stopping my mouth, I was wheezing too badly and too pricked by the pain in my side to speak. While I was silent, van Brugge lectured on, the altar before him filled with bowls and glasses. This time his tunic was a bright scarlet like a setting sun, and his surcoat was whitest samite, quilted with black thread.
“Most matter is formed by the mixture of many principles. Consider the many kinds and faculties of man, or water which transforms between its icy state into the natural liquid and further into the vapor of steam by the application of heat.
“Refined substances are termed so because they have been purified until once principle dominates.”
He gestured to a fuming beaker on the altar.
“Consider aqua regia, which has as its ruling principle dissolution. The true alchemist learns to perceive the principles of matter, and of the will that rules his own soul, and to refine both toward greater purity. To one enlightened, the form of matter is as a mask, seen past with ease, changed for another with a thought.”
He plunged his finger into the smoking beaker, and the fumes dispersed. He tilted the vessel to let us see the yellow caustic had turned to clear water in the glass
Footsteps thundered down the stairs of the entry. Two Orcharders bowled over the student who stood to meet them and charged forward. They seemed too large for the space, stooping under the low ceiling, broad enough to fill the whole chamber side to side.
Van Brugge flicked his moist finger toward them, and they fell into twisted heaps with bellows of pain and a snapping sound that made me think of the tendons he had displayed at the dissection.
Van Brugge’s voice did not rise or falter.
“Yet the thing transmuted still contains the echo or memory of its natural form, so as the aqua regia contained the principle of dissolution, water which remembers that form may dissolve the bonds that hold muscle to bone, if handled by a magus with the will to command form and matter in such a way.”
The Orcharders were not dead. They whimpered and gulped like fish that drown in air.
Van Brugge stepped around the altar and came forward to where I stood against the wall.
“Now, young Bernard, you will speak with me in private while my students remove this dross.”
He led me to the smaller room behind the altar, a little cube of mortarless stones, mostly full of shelves packed with jars and packets and the strange tools of the alchemist’s art.
Van Brugge regarded me with a fatherly expression, but the terror that had risen back into my throat at the Orcharders’ appearance did not fade under his softness, and I began to wonder if I had not escaped the pot for the fire below.
“Louis told me the Orcharders had their hooks deep in you, and their seed as well, soon. I told him you were lost. He must not have believed me, and quite rightly, since you are standing here. I guess he has not been so fortunate, since you are here alone. They would have sent more to pursue you for witnessing their rite if they had not caught a better prize to replace you. Tell me everything, please.”
“No.” I shoved him, and he was unyielding as an oak tree. “First tell me what these Orcharders are, and what you are that you are to know so much of them, and what you have already done to my good cousin.”
Van Brugge sighed and buzzed his lips.
“Time presses, and you are too ignorant to understand all I could tell you. In brief: the Orcharders have mistaken a strange kind of hell for a secret Eden and polluted themselves with pieces of that other place. It makes them deadly as a plague, poison to both flesh and soul. La Rocelle is entirely a creature of that other place, and the human skin he wears is only a disguise to let him do his work in this one.
“I am as you have seen, a master of many studies, esoteric and public. I am a doctor of medicine, and a master of alchemy. I will not die of old age, nor by ordinary misadventure, and I am sure that when I pass my soul knows every password to escape the spheres of sinful matter and be one with God who is Sophia who is everything and more.
“I have done nothing to your cousin but teach him, and he is a good student, already he begins to escape the sinful prison of a mortal flesh to refine himself into a man worthy of heaven.
“I have no more time to waste on salving your ignorance. Tell me now what has happened tonight and where Louis is.”
Whether it was sorcery or only his dignity and imperious manner, the command brooked no refusal, and I spilled my story out in gasps and almost sobs, from the first sermon on the steps of Notre Dame until tonight, the candles in the cold and the twisting forms and tearing flesh and Louis battle on the rooftop.
Van Brugge frowned, and it grew deeper as I spoke, until his eyebrows knit like two black rams slowly grinding their horns together.
“That is bad,” he said when I had finished and was gasping and wondering why I had spoken so openly. “You very nearly drank a bitter cup tonight, but for the world it might have been better if it did not pass you by. Louis corrupted by the Orcharders would be much worse than you. He has learned much from me, and already his soul is refined enough and his body strengthened so that he could do much evil with their cursed seed growing in him. I must do something. I did not wish to confront la Rocelle. He is one of the few creatures in Paris that might really harm me, but I see that it cannot be avoided.
“Do you know how to use a sword, or any kind of weapon?”
That he meant to rescue Louis, and his casual assumption that I could help and would follow him on the adventure quieted the questions and fears still roiling on my tongue. I had seen with my own eyes the horror of La Rocelle and the Orcharders. Maybe van Brugge was a sinner and a sorcerer too, but he meant to save Louis, and I had not the fervor left to question his virtue longer.
That did not make me a warrior.
“No, of course not. I am a student and perhaps one day a canon lawyer. I’ve no business with swords.”
“A dagger will do for you then.”
I reached for my side by habit, but remembered that my dagger was left behind with my clothes.
Van Brugge fumbled a moment among the debris on the groaning shelves and produced one, dull, and very heavy when he put it in my hand.
“This dagger contains the principle of the lodestone in its matter. If you strike the Orcharders in their unnatural parts, it will weaken them.”
Without more advice than that, he stepped back out into the main chamber, and I followed him.
Van Brugge explained the situation briefly to all who remained, and I learned then that he had long been aware of the Orcharders, and that, given time, they might bring about the time of Revelation early, if they succeeded in spreading their secret corruption to all the lords of Christendom. He asked for any willing to accompany us to deliver Louis, and three chose to come. All gathered vials of clay or glass from the back room, and hung them on their belts, then ran to their lodgings for more gear. Van Brugge brought nothing, but only began to walk slowly with me alongside him, smiling his little half smile.
When his students returned again to join us, one wore heavy leather gloves studded with brass, and the air was hazy around them as if there was a great heat. Another’s tunic was stiff as steel when he struck it with his long dirk to demonstrate. The third carried a heavy axe leaned on his shoulder. It did not seem like any product of alchemy or magic, only an oaken haft and a broad blade of steel, but I expected by his grim expression that the man, only a little older than myself, was well skilled with its use.
The streets were empty so late into the heel of night, and we met no one and no resistance until we found the little postern to the stair locked. The axe wielder raised his weapon up, but van Brugge waved him away and broke the door to flinders with a casual backhanded blow.
He led us up the hidden stair, and I came last of all, shrinking in my fear and praying for the strength to stand with these uncanny champions.
The chapel and its candles still remained, and now the Orcharders all stood beyond the rail, all with their hands on something at the altar, chanting low in some tongue I could not recognize.
They turned and swarmed back to meet us, and now whatever corruption had grown in them expanded and was manifest. Sancio’s maw and its living teeth stretched from his nose down to his collar. Another spread wings that I could not convince myself were shadow or flesh. Claws of black bone tore through skin. A serpent lolled its cobblestone-sized head on the shoulder of the man whose gut it grew from. One ran at us on six limbs like whips of livid skin, and all of them were bulged and bulked with an unnatural flesh or cloaked in darkness, and I could not say from one look to the next which was which.
La Rocelle hung limp and hollow as a puppet from the brow of a huge thing of shadow-flesh, raised up on many formless limbs, its squat broad body like an upturned bowl, its front a face of many bright eyes and one maw like a lamprey big enough to swallow a prize bull.
Louis lay naked on the altar in its shade, the thing they had all been bent over. He shook and writhed and whimpered, but did not rise or seem to see us.
I moved in van Brugge’s wake as the battle joined, twenty paces from the hidden chapel. Armor-tunic turned bone claws, and their wielder clutched his face when some caustic vial broke against it, then fell with the armor-wearer’s dirk in his chest. Leather gloves caught whipping tentacles and burned them black, and the gloved student drew his victim in like a fisherman pulling up his net. The sturdy axeman hewed one hulk down, and then another. Van Brugge pushed forward to Louis. He tore the serpent from its root and left the man bleeding. He touched the wings of darkling flesh and they fell limp and weighed the winged man down as if they had been lead.
In the shifting shadows of the roof, I almost thought the alchemist shone with his own light. I could hear he was reciting psalms under his breath, as if they were spells for his protection.
I had no more time to wonder when we came close. Sancio came for me, that black mouth gaping. His voice was still the same, still sweet and warm and full of true conviction.
“It is not too late, Bernard, friend of my heart. You can still learn to bear good fruit.”
I goggled like a hare at an adder, even as he bent that black maw to my neck. Only Louis’ feeble moan shook me from slumber. I brought the heavy dagger up at the last moment and drove into the black flesh, and Louis crumpled. I could hear him gasp for breath. Almost I knelt to help my friend, but I made myself see the monster there and let him lie.
I turned toward the altar as what had been la Rocelle reached for van Brugge with a forest of rude limbs. I was certain van Brugge shone now. The beast opened its mouth wide to show the teeth like stars within.
“Yes,” said van Brugge. “Devour me, Devil. I am hot with spirit. Hot enough to kindle the refiner’s fire in you. Do you think that your wealth of flesh will profit you when your soul comes to judgment?”
The thing hesitated. It spoke with la Rocelle’s voice.
“You might prove poison soil for the fruit, but even such as you would die trying to stifle it if once it rooted in you. Do you dare such a death, little immortal?”
“Do you?” challenged van Brugge, his composure absolute. “My soul is composed. What of your own?”
The thing took one step back from him, and then the shadows twisted. It was gone, just like a Devil, to tempt and then refuse to the test of real faith. The inhuman parts of the Orcharders went with it, leaving only bloody flesh. Van Brugge crossed himself and spat.
I ran to Louis. He was clammy with fever and cold, shaking, his eyes rolled back in his head.
Van Brugge was a step behind me.
“We must remove the poison seed,” he said, “before it kills him or takes root.”
He opened Louis’ chest as easily as he had the cadaver, and with barely more blood. I could hardly see the black and writhing thing next to his heart, but van Brugge drew it out, and it pumped in his hand.
“Kill it,” he said.
I brought the knife from the ruin of Sancio’s throat and drove it in, so hard it sparked against the altar stone.
Van Brugge had already closed Louis’ wound as easily as he had opened it.
“He will be some time recovering,” van Brugge said. “But I will instruct you in his care, and more, if you should wish it.”
When I was certain Louis would be safe and in as much comfort as he could have, I came here and found you, Father, and I must ask for counsel as well as for my penance. I still know not whether van Brugge is a righteous man or only a sorcerer who twists the scriptures to make himself seem so. Will I risk sin and damnation if I study his strange arts? Was it a sin to kill the creature that had been Sancio? Or was it sin to trust such monsters and learn scripture from them? Please, Father, tell what penance I must do, and what sin I must do it for.
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R. K. Duncan is a fat queer polyamorous wizard and author of fantasy, horror, and occasional sci-fi. He writes from a few rooms of a venerable West Philadelphia row home, where he dreams of travel and the demise of capitalism. His other full-time job is keeping house for himself and his live-in partner. He attended Viable Paradise 23 in 2019. His occasional musings and links to other work can be found at rkduncan-author.com. He is at heart a union man, and he asks everyone reading this to join him in solidarity resisting all uses of the digital scab that is generative AI. | |